Silent Running

After my last, I’ve taken some actions re Twitter. One is a 14% reduction in the accounts I follow (and I wasn’t following many). Another is muting several accounts I don’t want to unfollow or block, but need to tune out for a while. A third is to mute lots of specific words. I think this only works on my computer and doesn’t feed through to the settings on my phone. The words muted include Corbyn and Trump.

More generally, of the people I’ve been friends with longest, from school or elsewhere, I remembered I’m the only one who had a Facebook account and I’m the only one using Twitter. It’s easy to get drawn into the thing of seeing a microcosm of opinion as representative of the society as a whole.

One of the things I noticed on our first visit to China was that I kinda missed Facebook from the perspective of posting pictures from holiday, but didn’t miss Twitter at all. Now, just like Facebook, I don’t want to delete my Twitter account entirely, because there are times it has its uses; but the option of doing a wholesale cull of the accounts I follow is getting some traction in my thoughts.

In the meantime, I was heavily invested in reading Dorothy Dunnett’s House of Niccolo series but got distracted. I’m re-engaging with that. Book 4, Scales of Gold, is straight in with subterfuge and manoeuvring, with two assassination attempts in the first 30 pages. There’s a writing lesson there. Also, you learn all you ever need to know about Renaissance banking and trade in the process, in a good way.